Vanished Years (25 page)

The next morning we drive for an hour outside the city, leaving the smart new highways for the roads I remember from the old days: dangerous torrents full of potholes around which the traffic swerves at
breakneck speed, with banks of crusted rubbish and the submerged skeleton of the odd car. The countryside is flat and misty and you can suddenly feel the vastness of Russia. We drive beside a wide river for a few miles and then turn off into a tree-lined avenue towards a cluster of modest buildings on the edge of some woods. Perhaps we are in the stable block of some long-forgotten villa. Through an archway a red-brick asylum, built in the Soviet style, is pale in the mist. The noise of children playing and the shrieks of rooks in the bare trees above remind me of my schooldays and my blood runs cold.

A man appears through the fog, wearing a white laboratory coat. He introduces himself as Dr Veronin. He is a gentle giant, built in the tradition of Soviet Reality, with a pronounced jaw, extended limbs and large hands. He takes us to his office where we have coffee and he tells us about the children in his care. They are all abandoned, most of them with HIV and some with full-blown Aids. He is joined by a pretty nurse, and we all set off to look around.

The children have put on a show for us. A sweet lady plays a piano and the kids sing. They sit on little chairs in a circle but one of them is in a bad mood and refuses to take part. He sits with his head in his hands while the others dance and scream around him. We are all enraptured. There is something indescribable in the eyes of these children. They leap trustingly into our arms while we walk around the hospital, chattering, pointing and showing us their beds, while Dr Veronin explains how each one comes to be here. They all adore him and every child has his or her favourite nurse or, in one case, the cleaning lady. These ladies care for them so selflessly that you want to burst into tears. Some of the older children go out in the morning to the local school, but they are often bullied for being HIV positive and have to leave.

The four-year-old boy sits away from the others in the large playroom, silent and motionless in the blur of activity around him. The other kids scream about, being planes and monsters, but this boy just sits on his stool as though time has stopped. He has a thin worried face with black eyes, tense lips and thinning hair. He could be four or
forty. He arrived at the hospital with his younger brother two years ago. Theirs is a familiar story. The elder one inherited the HIV virus from his mother, who injected drugs. The younger one, however, did not. Even though he was hardly a couple of years older, the big boy looked after and protected his younger brother and was always by his side. They lived in squalor in a suburb of Petersburg. Their mother rarely fed or washed them – when they were found, they were nearly feral – she spent most of her time gagged out on heroin. The father of the boys died of an overdose, in the flat. She met another man and immediately got pregnant. As soon as she had the new baby, she abandoned the other two. On the street. According to Dr Veronin, when they arrived at the orphanage they communicated in a special language and were happy as long as they were together. But then one day, the mother’s mother,
babushka
, arrived and took the healthy boy away to live with her, leaving the older brother on his own. That was a year ago. The boy hasn’t spoken since.

That afternoon we visit the Botkin hospital in the heart of St Petersburg, another rambling Soviet edifice, and a labyrinth of passages and staircases. It is a twenty-minute walk from the entrance, about which a few clapped-out ambulances are cluttered, to the bright airy showroom on the third floor where three smart doctors in crisp white coats stand in the corner with their stethoscopes around their necks, looking busy. The room is white. The floor is white. The large windows are spotlessly clean. One of the doctors is a stocky woman with cruel eyes and grey, wiry hair, swept back like Einstein. She would have been nominated luchshiye rabotnik in the old days – best worker – and she is probably still a KGB grass.

‘There you go again,’ says David.

Well. Her feet are planted far apart on the floor and she wears white clogs. She talks to Stephanie Powers and ignores the rest of us. Stephanie is careful and acquiescent, which is strange because most of what this woman is saying is a pack of lies. Her pearls of Russian wisdom are strung into English by a weird activist queen who runs an outpatients group and also works for the Elton John Foundation. He
has a red face with a handlebar moustache and wears camouflage pants. Translating the woman’s lies, he looks at us intensely, daring us to confront her. She insists that it is mostly drug users who are being infected with HIV in Russia, and that the epidemic began only in 1997. She says that medication is available to all. She says that there are hardly any homosexuals with HIV.

‘But that can’t be true,’ I say.

‘It isn’t!’ says the translator, under his breath.

‘Da!’ she clucks defensively.

‘But surely one in ten people all over the world are gay?’

‘Not in Russia.’

‘Is that because they are forced to live in secret?’

‘Certainly not. ’

The meeting quickly freezes over.
Hart to Hart
are hell-bent on diplomacy and begin to wind things up. The translator winks and gestures for us to follow him out of the room. David and I slip out after him.

‘I show you the Aids Department,’ he whispers, and leads us down a warren of back staircases and narrow corridors.

With every step the hospital gets shabbier and hotter. Gone is the pristine spaceship of the third-floor consulting room. Soon we are rushing down a subterranean passage towards a large pair of double doors. Any minute now red lights are going to start flashing and a klaxon will go off and we shall be dragged back up to the Einstein dyke on the third floor. You need a card to get through the double doors. The translator produces one with a flourish.

‘Da-dah!’ He swipes triumphantly and the doors click open. Now the cameraman materialises at the end of the passage along with the photographer and journalist from Russian
Vogue
who are covering the trip.

The translator swears under his breath. ‘Quick. They are following us.’

We rush through the door which closes mechanically although the others manage to squeeze through as it clicks shut.

Here finally is the situation with Russian Aids.

Rows of empty metal beds stand in wards of peeling green walls off a wide gloomy corridor. Naked light bulbs hang from the ceiling. There is a rancid dusty smell of floors washed with dirty water. Mosfilm was cleaner than this. The place is deserted.

Finally we discover a solitary man in a dressing gown and three sweaters. He is sitting on a bed in an empty dormitory at the end of the corridor, startled and upset by the sudden invasion of TV crew and photographer, celebrity and journalist. He comes to the door and tries to shut us out but our (Russian) cameraman stands in the way, engaging him all the while through the lens. He has no sympathy. The patient’s eyes bulge with impotent fury as he tries to tuck his head into his dressing gown and escape across the corridor but the cameraman follows. A weird, slow-motion, split-second scuffle ensues. The cameraman holds onto the patient with his free hand, trying to turn him round, but the patient keeps on going, charging down the corridor towards the sanctuary of the toilets, while the translator, horrified, grabs the cameraman’s arm, trying to pull him away. The cameraman, still filming, loses his balance. The camera falls from his shoulder and smashes onto the stone floor.

During the moment of stunned silence that follows, the photographer from
Vogue
takes my picture. Flash! With a howl the patient makes a final dash and locks himself into the loo.

It is a tragic scene with comic undertones, another masterclass in Chekhov, and not unlike a wildlife documentary in which some poor wildebeest escapes a crocodile while trying to cross a river. We have completely violated this poor man’s space, and we have observed his humiliation in our UN high heels, and the translator is – quite rightly – livid. Emotionally and physically. He is now a purple gargoyle. He shrieks at the cameraman, who bellows right back, while the couple from
Vogue
have a half-hearted nervous breakdown that ‘all this could be happening in their country’. The translator and the cameraman shout and point and tap their heads, more animal than human as they lumber round each other, while
the two fashionistas swoon in shawls and patent-leather shoes in this curious drama in the diabolical corridor of the Aids wing.

Mariangela appears from a door far away, giggling as usual.

‘There you are. What’s going on?’

Hart to Hart are frosty when we regroup outside the hospital and in the car give us a talking-to about going off piste, and that things are very delicate here in Russia at the moment, and that they have worked so hard to get this far, and that we all have to be very careful. The translator, who is with us in the car, rolls his eyes.

‘But it’s good for them to see what’s really going on,’ he says. ‘The truth is that gay people are afraid to go to the doctor.’

‘Why?’

‘Because the doctors normally report them to the police. Most gay people with Aids pretend they are drug addicts.’

‘There you go,’ sneers David. ‘Its better to be a junkie than a queer. This place is disgusting.’

It seems impossible that the world goes on as usual after a day like today, but here we are, listless or anxious, laughing or smoking, bumper to bumper, oblivious to everything outside the four walls of our own world. Dr Veronin’s orphanage, the speechless boy on his stool, the man in the three sweaters, are just the undertow of the great suffering wave upon which the rest of us mindlessly surf, desperate to keep afloat, beeping and swearing, inching along on a belch of exhaust. The rain pours down now, and the palaces and pepper pots by the side of the road melt in the deluge like wedding cakes. Similarly the lost boys and the solitary patient, bathed perhaps in tears tonight, will pass by and disappear, stretched by time into thin shadows. This is the terrible truth and I plunge into the usual field-trip depression – it always happens: that raw feeling of utter futility that makes one want to curl up and die. There’s a lull in the conversation, as if the same void has struck us all.

‘It still amazes me,’ muses David, thinking aloud, ‘that one disease can inspire so much hate.’

‘Or apathy.’

Or love.

Now it is evening. We are in one of St Petersburg’s few gay bars. It’s rather like Joe Allen’s. Brick walls, low lights and checked tablecloths. We are here to meet Andrei, a doctor from Siberia, and his cohort of twenty young activists. They have come from all over Russia and are determined to educate Russia’s homosexual community about the threat of HIV. As Andrei says, whether we like it or not, about ten per cent of all Russians are gay.

‘See!’ says David.

In a completely hostile environment most of them are forced to live secretly, adding greatly to the danger posed by HIV.

‘Remember,’ Andrei says, ‘this is a country where every other person is still an informer.’

The fact is that most gay people have little or no idea about the disease. How could they have? The government more or less refuses to accept that homosexuals exist, so naturally there is no state funding to inform them about safe sex.

I am standing with Andrei on a podium, looking down at the innocent, upturned faces of his army in the half-light of the bar: the blunt noses, the deep-set eyes, the high cheekbones, the Nureyev lips over broad jaws and, in one case, a delicious pair of cauliflower ears (my favourite), but mostly what is striking about them is their sober attention. The liberated queen of the West has none of this inner grace as she flings herself from the dance floor to the dark room, high on lavatory cleaner. These boys are giving their time to help others, putting themselves on the line just by being here tonight. And yet on the evolutionary ladder of this cruel cloud cuckoo land they are only a rung above murderers and not as good as junkies.

I ask them how many of them have ‘come out’ to their parents. Only two put up their hands. It’s not a surprise. After all, even men working at
Vogue
prefer to stay in the closet.

‘If you can’t be gay in
Vogue
, then where can you?’ asks David, and I agree, but no one sees the funny side.

After the meeting we rush to Moskovsky Station, another crumbling, blue-and-white wedding cake. We are taking the night train to Moscow. It is a trip I used to make with my dog at weekends to get away from Moscow in the old days, and I loved it. Through the nineteenth-century halls of the terminal building, the station itself is a Stalinist shoebox, similar in scale and style to the fascist stations of Italy. The place is crowded and it could be 1950. Men still wear astrakhan hats and moustaches. They jostle with small wide women in shawls and scarves. Occasionally a New Russian strides through the crowd like a superimposed cartoon figure – a gazelle in furs with a bodyguard, but mostly the station is still in the hands of the poor. Their world hasn’t much changed since those pre-neon days of red flags and military caps, and tonight there are still women sitting on their haunches selling pickled
gorchik
. Thank God, two of the activist boys are with us and take us to the platform, or we would never find the train. The fierce-looking couchette girl studies our tickets for clues to a murder, then grudgingly lets us on board. The whistle blows and the boys wave us off.

We settle down in our bunks and make preliminary grunts and gestures at our new room-mates. One is a bald gentleman already in his pyjamas and the other is a sozzled young man with a round face who smells of booze. I feel like a student again, but David says he may be having one of his panic attacks and lies down facing the wall, doing breathing exercises.

‘Oh no! It’s not one of your acute paroxysmal positional vertigo attacks, is it?’ I ask wearily.

‘I think so.’

Serious panic attacks are not funny. Rooms expand and contract. Colours flare and blind you. You think you are having a heart attack, but actually you’re just panicking. I once went with David to an air show in Fort Lauderdale just as one was starting. As the latest jets screeched over our heads at the speed of a neutrino, David went from white to grey to green. His face visibly shrank and he clasped his chair with his hands, as the whole world turned upside down. But that’s another story.