I said goodbye to her and switched off the phone. It had begun to drizzle again. I’m always losing my umbrellas and gloves. When I was a little girl I would also lose my handkerchiefs. This would make my grandmother angry. What an idiot; here I am again without an umbrella. I was angry with myself. Things were worse than usual because that afternoon I’d paid a fair amount for a new hairdo, and wasn’t eager to expose my head to the drizzling rain. I got out of the car, hurried over the piazza to Smolenskaya passage, which slightly resembles Paris’s Rue de Rivoli, and headed towards a new umbrella.
Sergey was on my mind all the while. Time had played its game with him, but he had managed to remain a handsome man. I remembered him ankle-deep in water with his jeans rolled up on the beach in the evening in Tunisia. I remembered him chasing me – I was in my early twenties at that time – along the sea edge. I thought then, that I would burst, I was so full of new impressions… summer in the middle of winter, Carthage looming in the distance, my own irresistible beauty. I am not really sure what Sergey was thinking about. He was two years older than me. It was in the early eighties; we were Soviet students doing our practical training in an Arab country.
Various thorny negotiations at Camp David between the USA, Israel and Egypt over the problem of another Middle East peace process prevented me from going to Cairo University, because the principled Soviet state decided to temporarily interrupt its diplomatic relationship with Egypt. As a result I found myself in quite a different country, with a different dialect of Arabic and French as a second language instead of English – which had been like a native tongue for me since my school years. But having come to Africa, I found that I was quite happy.
A lot of things happened for the first time: a whole year spent far from home without my parents in a capitalist country, where everything is prohibited and those things which are not prohibited should not be used – because the price is not worth it. The whole year tightly scheduled, the vigilant eyes of others on me – people with influential acquaintances in Moscow. This first trip really was a major test of my trustworthiness and survival capacity; dealing with my first harsh criticism and its consequences, quarrels, pettiness, naïve impulses of the heart nipped in the bud, and, after all, kindness, cooperation, interesting acquaintances, trips, the discovery of a new reality, a new world and Arabic in particular. And then, of course, the return.
– Did she really live abroad for a year? – such a question at that time had great import. I had had the chance to form an objective impression of our country. The conclusions I came to during that year in Tunisia drastically changed my life. I failed the trial and became disillusioned with the Soviet way of life. It was not Tunisia which overwhelmed me. I was overwhelmed by our people there. Their actions, sometimes violent, were inherently abominable. The way they treated us…. I was ashamed by the behavior of our teachers, doctors, and engineers; by the horrible conditions in which they lived; by the miserable money they were paid; by the dreams for which they suffered all that.
Now it seems quite natural – to have one’s own opinion, to say the things you think are right, to disagree with the crowd, to educate your children privately, to travel to Milan to buy some clothes. We have begun to forget a lot, to embellish things. Of course there were things which were good: it was a superpower, with a great number of scientific research centers, low prices for household essentials (for understandable reasons). But I perceive life in from the viewpoint of an individual person – my own self. I would not want to read releases of Meeting ХХХ issued by the only party, uncontrollably experimenting with social modeling. I would far rather be reading the new Russian Vogue than waiting for a bus at the bus stop, or queuing up in a shop to buy Polish lipstick.
It was New Year’s Eve, 1984. We left the ambassadorial club, where they were spouting official political toasts over tables spread with Olivier salad and Danish canned ham, to the sound of plastic corks popping from bottles of semi-sweet Soviet champagne. When the high-ranking officials of the Embassy had duly expressed their wishes and left for their apartments to celebrate with their nearest and dearest, and the music was turned on, we escaped, climbed over the fence and hurried to the sea. It was quite a distance from there to the sea, however, and some peasant in a shabby van gave us a lift. My companion, whom I was to encounter at the cash counter in Stockmann all those years later, squeezed a couple of dinars into his hand and wished him a happy New Year.
There were plenty of umbrellas, both expensive and cheap ones. I chose up a green one like usual, so it would match the car.
Before going home, I looked through the biography of a foreign woman, who had been invited to deliver some lectures on the perception of jewelry to potential Eastern European clients. Her thesis, written in Cambridge, was devoted to jewelry in the portraits done by Florentine masters of the Renaissance. I felt a melancholy somewhat similar to the feelings of a second rate actor, seeing Hamlets, Khlestakovs, Jourdains and the like, cursing his tray with a glass of water which he must carry out at the right moment with a simple “dinner is served”. That was the way things were. World universities had been inaccessible for us. Our conception of jewelry was limited to the State Diamond Fund at most, and local production didn’t warrant such theses. We had many other experiences instead, of course, but that’s not what I’m driving at. This visiting speaker was an Italian woman who had no doubt been surrounded by Florentine masters since her early childhood. I felt melancholy because in my twenties I had not been able to recognize my inner abilities and wishes. I didn’t really discover this world until the age of forty, after much strolling to and fro, even traveling between countries….
I paid several hundred to hear her lecture Perception of Jewelry. It put me in mind of a description aimed at savages, detailing how to serve a table full of white people. How could she have known that such terms as carat, guilloche, pave were second nature to us, that we had all handled pearls, that her audience would be decked out in jewelry from the latest collections of Cartier, Bvlgari, and VanCleef & Arpels»? She was going through her usual routine for the natives, smiling condescendingly and glancing at her watch. Almost all women base their opinion on details that they arrange after an event into some final composition of their own. She must have been annoyed by our Moscow habits, drastically different from those of her well-to-do fellow Italians, and she probably assumed we were the fashionable wives of New Russians who had made a fortune playing foul games. By the end of the third hour my right-hand neighbor put her beautifully coiffed head on the table and succumbed to sleep. I wasn’t going to disturb her. And it was only at this moment that the Italian lady became animated. Maybe she was thinking about tomatoes thrown at the mediocre tenor; at any rate,